Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism [Paperback]

Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic research there as well as among immigrants to the US and Israel, Cooper tells an intimate and personal story about what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Together with her historical research about a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews in other parts of the world, this lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history.

Alanna E. Cooper is an anthropologist and cultural historian who has held research and teaching positions at Boston University, University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, and Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions. Her publications have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Review of Books, Anthropology of East Europe Review, Jewish Social Studies, and AJS Review.

Innovative and thought provoking, this well researched and well constructed book . . . provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of Jewish identities. . . . The Bukharan Jewish community can be taken as a case study of Jewish diasporic dynamics and forces. The book demonstrates and analyzesboth historically and ethnographicallythe mechanisms that underlie the sense of oneness between the Bukharan Jews and Jewish communities in other cultural contexts.

Preface: Reining in Diaspora's Margins
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Introduction
1. First Encounter: Bukharan Jewish Immigrants in an Ashkenazi School in New York
2. Writló–